Blaze Orange

About Blaze Orange

In Blaze Orange, photographer Travis Dewitz captures the joy, excitement, and camaraderie of deer hunting in Wisconsin. A lone hunter in a tree stand as dawn arrives. A girl and her grandfather scanning a field in the fresh snow. Tired hunters laughing around the evening fire back at camp. These are snapshots of a culture touchstone. With more than 600,000 hunters taking to the fields and woods of the state each year, the whitetail deer season is by far Wisconsin’s largest sporting event. Dewitz documents the hunt and more as he rides along with hunters and a game warden, visits local mom-and-pop stores where hunters gather, and records the industries that operate alongside the deer season—a taxidermist and knife maker, butchers and sausage makers. The result is a stunning and keen-eyed chronicle of one season of the Wisconsin deer hunt.

He takes us from the grainy darkness of predawn on opening day, to the gritty meat lockers that fill up after the season has closed. The book is fascinating and begs the viewer to travel along on the journey of the hunt.

Blaze Orange is the kind of book that you want to leave proudly sitting out on your coffee table for all of your guests and visitors to see and look through when they stop over.

Kelly

The book Blaze Orange, is a staggering achievement of solicitous images that illustrate the deep culture of what real hunting in the Northwood’s entails.

Erika

Blaze Orange delivers what words often cannot, the true feeling of the Wisconsin deer season.

Bob Willging, author of History Afield

If you want to understand the place that deer hunting holds in the culture of rural Wisconsin–and America–studying “Blaze Orange” is the next best thing to spending a lot of time in the woods yourself.

The Author

My name is Travis Dewitz and I am from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I love photography. It lightens my heart, fills my soul, and allows me to capture life the way that I see it. My work is Conceptual, Emotive, Expressive, Editorial, Surreal and Eclectic. Photography is a genuine art form, which I demonstrate by my wide portfolio of interests. Photography is a way to capture moments and make them magical, bring the dreams into this existence. I am passionate about fashioning new worlds through photographs as I extend my visions beyond the realm of the camera, creating images that resemble paintings and speak of an era that is not our own. That’s what I love about photography; it always looks as if it was taken in another world to ours, in a melancholy atmosphere; a vintage road taken from afar. I have incredible vision, which you can see in all of my photos.

“Art is not in the …eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.” – Seth Godin

Travis Dewitz presents the deer hunt in a way that is unvarnished and yet poetic, graceful, and subtle. Page by page, Blaze Orange makes you part of the Wisconsin deer season, from the hunt itself to the many people and businesses that depend on and provide support to hunters. These images transport you to the snow-covered woods, and they let you see the soft light of a November sunrise, imagine the smells and sounds of the local bars, and consider the craftsmanship of a custom knife maker.